We've talked about it, and now it's here. Our first big pass on combat balance. Always keep in mind, things like this are a work in progress, but this has a significant change to how the game plays, and we think it's a lot more fun. (Try out the Boom bots. They're the bomb)

There are a ton of changes in this build, including Mac full screen for those who've been asking! Hop in, check it out, and have fun. There have also been some fundamental changes to how we send and receive network data that should help everyone, but especially people on slower connections.

We're still working on a few other fixes, but we wanted to get this one out ASAP as it resolves a few major known bugs. We're still working on the Mac OS/X issue, a few linux issues, and another prevalent crash on lobby creation crash when selecting planets.

REMINDER: Please disable all mods. New updates often introduce compatibility issues in mods, which could make your experience way less excellent than normal.

This latest update is sponsored by ... Performance. Stability and performance across the board have been improved. Client multi-threading, for instance, has been introduced to the game making it stronger, better, and faster than ever before. Along these lines, the UI has been given a new round of polish, which will make the game feel a lot more snappier when it counts the most.

On the gameplay front, we've done another pass on strategic and build icons. Building and unit icons now have more graphical sizzle, making them more readable when the action gets turbo-hot. Also, strategic icons have received a similar overhaul.

As always, we've included the full notes below. Oh! And if you want a sneak peek at what we're working on right now, press Tab while playing. Delicious, delicious live stats are coming!

Detailed Build Notes:

AI: Re-vamped the AI difficulty levels.
AI: Added a new difficulty flag to set whether the AI prioritizes scouting areas of the planet by metal spot count.
AI: AI can now build the TML Bot.
AI: Increased the value to the AI of destroying metal/energy producers and consumers.
AI: Improved AI attack location selection.
AI: AI will see fabbers as a threat now.
AI: Modified the AI fabber to factory ratio.
AI: AI will build orbital fighters to defend against orbital threats better.

Alerts: Fixed the alert preview border.

Audio: A ton of weapon and move sounds

Client FX: Delta V jets should now appear at any distance.
Client FX: Fixed particle system frustum culling, to actually do it properly.

Gameplay: Dead enemy units (especially cmdrs) will no longer trigger sight notifications. This fixes the bug where dead cmdrs triggered VO.
Gameplay: Fix to allow spawn effects to play on non-primary planets.
Gameplay: Fix for SXX not attacking targets while on patrol.

Gameplay/UI: Updated build bar icons. This is a major overhaul of all unit build icons, coloration, etc. You will probably need to re-learn the icons a little bit, but they should also be a lot easier to learn now.
Gameplay/UI: Art pass on all strategic icons. There is now consistent UI language on strat icons that should make it easier to quickly assess your armies/opponents.

Lobby: Spectators will no longer hold colors.
Lobby: Adding a new slot will no longer reset ai difficulty. Also includes various layout fixes.

Linux: Disable persistent buffer mapping on Linux. Turns out there's some issue with it on at least NVIDIA proprietary drivers, so disable it.

Mac: Fix PA.app icon on Mac.

Mac/Linux: Fix period, underscore, etc for Mac & Linux.

Settings: Changes to the keybinds will now correctly register as a change to the settings which allows the keybinds to correctly interact with the restore defaults button.
Settings: The server region selecter will now correctly interact with with the save/ save & exit buttons. Changes to the server region will no longer be applied until the settings are saved.

UI: Fixing the position of the advanced radar in the build bar.
UI: Fix cases where the planet list panel did not sync up with the camera.
UI: Fixed the border around holodecks.
UI: Fix typo in advanced defense tech for GW
UI: Fix for stale error messages showing up in the transit scene. (e.g. Incorrect "failed to connect" style messages)
UI: UI actions triggered by the keyboard should now play an audio response.
UI: Fix for the notification alert acknowledge keybinding (defaults to 'space').
UI: Players (self) will no longer appear in their own friendlist.
UI: Fix for displaying KS backer cmdrs when the backer name is not given. Improved behavior if you redeems a coupon for an item that isn't in the catalog.
UI: Fix bug where players panel was not informed of each armies allies.
UI: Explicitly setting strategic icon priority for base unit specs that use the default value.
UI: Adding the gamestats panel (bring it up with 'tab').
UI: Fix bug in econ display where shared resources could show more pips then intended.

Complex Changes Lists:

[Graphic / Client Multithreading]
- Parallel-for implementation for performant asynchronous and parallel-for processing.
- New lightweight mutexes for high-frequency locking.
- Parallelization of some heavy-weight CPU workloads....
- Many client update operations are now threadsafe. Or should be.
- Particle depth sort is now done asynchronously, saving up to 20ms/frame of CPU time for late-game.
- Animation update is now spread across many cores, giving a 2-4x speedup of this code (typically up to 10ms/frame on late game, now down to 4ms or less on a quad core system).
- Post animation client update is now spread across many cores, giving a 2-4x speed up on this.
- Particle update is now done in parallel-for, reducing execution time by 2-4x.
- Strategic icons are now depth and priority sorted, with the commander on top.
- Particles are now distance and camera-frustum culled (reducing rendering overhead by (sometimes) a significant factor (2-6ms observed in late-game).
- Various bug and correctness fixes in particle update and rendering.

[Gameplay] Weapon work:
- Clients can now show units targetting multiple entities
- Any given unit can target up to four unique targets
- Autoweapon task now uses weapon position to calculate distance for determining closest target. This does not change the max range of any unit or weapon, but individual weapons will prefer targets that are closer
- This is most noticeable for the battleship where the front and rear turrets are quite far apart

[Gameplay/UI/Modding] Start of match features:
-Added a 5 second count down after all players select a landing spot.
-On match start the camera will now look at the players choosen spawn.
-the Commander spawned for each player will be selected on match start.
-Added an api call to set your commander id, and updated api call for commander selection to select the commander from id if set. (maintains old functionality (select all commander in an army) if you switch armies or never set commander id)
-Added commander id to the server state message, and set commander id from this (so each client knows the id of the their commander)

[UI / Modding] Hover Panel Information
- The more information is now passed to the ui on hover. Cleaned up the way target information is sent. New information includes: target team (color), damage, rate of fire, build arm metal/energy cost.
- Added names and descriptions to the buildable ammo types. This information will be displayed when hovering an active launcher.
- Hover panels now show extra information, including: thumbnail image, s.icon, team color, damage, rate of fire, damage per second, build power, build efficiency.
- Also includes various fixes to handle the merge to main (the gamestats panel has been included and the game options sidebar has been fixed).

Free Cam
- Debug and free camera controls are now editable
- Free cam now has 6DOF controls in planetary mode
- Free cam controls override any other controls that interfere with it (aka s and f don't make lots of noise in debug camera!)
- Groundwork is laid for unit and celestial based 6DOF controls
- Change your keybindings to get into free cam mode with the 'toggle free camera' option

Provides a small change to allow casters to squelch chat from automatically appearing. It's on the social bar, it looks like a chat box. Click it to get a red hash through it, and text won't automatically show on your screen. Pressing enter WILL still display the text currently.

[Before playing this latest build of Planetary Annihilation, we ask that our community makes sure their eyeballs are planted securely in their skulls. Also, it's probably an excellent idea to turn off all your mods. New builds with the amount of eye-poppingly awesome changes like this one often introduce issues with outdated mods.]

Huge news! Huge update! Over the last three or so weeks, we’ve been churning out an epic amount of changes to Planetary Annihilation. Today, we’re releasing all of them in this Mega Update you’ve, hopefully, just received.

So, what’s new? The first thing we think you’ll notice is how much faster the game now runs. PA is quickly becoming a leaner and meaner machine than ever before courtesy some extra cycles devoted to ratcheting up the polish. Feel free to blow away your foes with a few more units, build a couple more factories, and play on more multi-planet systems. Basically, enjoy the smoother ride.

Speaking of rides, take note of the new Commander entrance animation. After picking your spawn point, your Commander will come screaming into battle in a orbital pod of doom. We also added a new spawn option that, if selected in a lobby, allows you to spawn anywhere on a map. This option brings a new kind of aggression that foreshadows the huge and unrestrained battles Planetary Annihilation is known for.

Icing on the cake? We've re-designed the lobby screen, as well as splashed a new coat of paint on Spectator mode, stat screen, and the game end user interface.

Oh, and one more thing: watch out (or cackle with glee) whenever you make a new system in the editor. Planets that intersect in orbit now explode when they touch.

Enhanced patch notes available below. Check them out, and don't forget to head over to the forums to discuss them in detail!

Detailed Changes:

[AI] Added an AI confif file to make it easier to change how the AI decides how many factories and fabbers to build.
[AI] Fix for AI units not moving while underwater
[AI] Updated AI to improve starting build and ramp up time.
[AI] difficulty balance pass.

[Celestial] Enhanced planet collisions
[Celestial] Tweak the celestial physics limitations so that elliptical orbits are much more possible.

[Client FX] Fix commander explosion not having lod distances set.

[Game Start] The commander cinematic now shows up for all players, not just the host.

[Gameover] Title and styling varies with game state (shows defeated, game complete, or victory).
[Gameover] Shows a summary of selected stats for the player.

[Gameplay] Fixed boom bots damage
[Gameplay] fix the default action when clicking on an unfinished factory to now repair the factory instead of assisting it.
[Gameplay] Move feature icons (aka metal spot icons) to the surface of the water, which is where we place metal extractors.
[Gameplay] Fix for units not reclaiming wreckage that overlaps a build area.
[Gameplay] Fix projectile turn rate code.
[Gameplay] Fix for multiplayer games not spawning multiple commanders.
[Gameplay] Switched commander spawn delay to 5 seconds so timing works with Ben's new spawn effect.
[Gameplay] tweeked torpedo launchers so the turret isn't as low. This will hopfully make them work better when built on the shoreline.

[Stats] Lots of behavior bug fixes (graph will now update at the correct times).
[Stats] Added a table view (which can show either a snapshot of current stats of the game averages).
[Stats] Stats history will be requested when the player becomes a spectator (since the collected history may not show oppenent data). This can take awhile since we can only ask for one slice of history at a time.
[Stats] added new army stats: units built / units lost / enemy units destroyed. changed the damagable interface to accept a damager, who will may be given credit when the damagable is killed. currently only unit kills are tracked. added new fields to the army stats message sent by the stats_viewpoint. these new fields are not currently used yet, though they are sent to the ui.
[Stats] the live game stats panel can now show data for multiple armies.

[System Templates] 5 player system updates and adding a smashable asteroid to the 4 player-4 planet system.

[System Editor] When dragging planets, round position to the nearest 100
[System Editor] Added simulation time display
[System Editor] Turned off the editing controls while simulating. (Changing those will result in basically corrupting your system.)
[System Editor] Fixed the simulation reset not going all the way to 0.
[System Editor] Changed the physics time step to be frame rate independent.
[System Editor] Correct the orbits of moons around moons (etc) when moving a base planet.
[System Editor] Make any planets veolicty grabber grabbable (not just the selected planet)
[System Editor] when you drag a planet with a moon, move the moon with the planet.
[System Editor] Draw orbits for all planets.
[System Editor] Changed the "simulate" button to "stop" while simulating. When "stop" is pressed, the system will reset to the initial state.
[System Editor] A very coarse pass on fixing up some default planets. To any future planet designers, mass 1000 is *almost* never the right choice. I don't want to go so far as to enforce a larger mass on the server, but please use 5000 as the 'default' moon mass.

[UI] camera controls will no longer automatically change when the active keymaps change. the live_game scene now subscribes the active keysmaps and wil update the camera controls when required.
[UI] Fix for ghost structures under construction not going away if they atrophied while hidden under the fog of war.
[UI] Fix for features and ghost structures not going away when a planet was destroyed if your camera was not focued on that planet.
[UI] adding an option to squech global chat.
[UI] Added the radius to the planet list in the server browser.
[UI] Fix path displays for elliptical orbits.
[UI] Fix for being able to select invisible build bar tabs.
[UI] enabled spectator-only chat. Spectators (or defeated players) now have their own team chat channel. Also, there is now an option to prevent spectators from chatting with live players. This option can be set in the lobby.

- Voxels
* All integration error related to crossing sector borders is _gone_.
* Voxels are a more general approach, simplifying much of the code.
* There is a Voxel for every AABB location that intersect with polygons.
* They are 4x4x4 meters (the 2d grid was 4x4 meters)
* Voxels have World Layer flags which determine pathability.
* nav library is about 70-80% changed (converted to use Voxels)
* Feels so good to check this in

- 3D Voxel Integrator
Integration looks at 6 neighbors if they exist (generally it's 4-5).
In 2D I would look at 4 so the difference here is minimum.
The 3d integration math is... much more involved than the 2d math, however the more expensive math only happens when all 6 neighbors exist.

- VoxelTree : Fast Spatial Query support
With the ability to look for voxels that have specific world layer flags.
VoxelTree lookup is faster than sector to sector 2d grid traversal
Speeds up AI Quieries and Structure placement Tests
I noticed faster client response times

- Major re-work of HGrid that makes it way, way, way faster
- Warning: wall of words incoming. Mostly because it took me awhile to figure out exactly what HGrid was before I could figure out what to do with it. So I figured it was worth writing an essay for future selves. Useful comments also included in hgrid.h

- Although this is big and scary looking the new code is way, way simpler. There's 40% less code! Less code and more speed. It brings a tear to my eye.

- First, a description of what HGrid
- The HGrid is a loose, sparse, heirarchical 3d grid. Whoa. That's a mouthful.
- Loose octree would be a simpler description but it's less fun to say and somewhat more ambiguous.

- Grid: It's a grid.
- 3d: It's a grid along the x, y, z axes
- Heirarchical: Layered where each grid cell has small grid cells inside it all the way down.
- Sparse: not all grid cells in the space exist.The vast, vast majority do not.
- Loose: objects are not fully contained in a cell. instead their center point is in a cell and that cell is at least as wide as the object's diameter.

- The loose property is of particular interest. Non loose grids have the unfortunate property that objects straddling grid borders have to go "up" a level in the hierarchy. Even at the top level there are degenerate edges such that even a tiny object will be in the top most level and must be checked by all objects. By being loose all objects can be in a fixed level based on their radius. They are then put in a bucket based on their center point, which is also super fast to calculate.
- The consequence of being "loose" is that for a given object you don't have to test just within it's grid cell and up the heirarchy. You also have to test neighbors. And neighbors up the heirarchy. More buckets but fewer bucket pairs.

- Ok so all of that is what the HGrid is. Which honestly wasn't clear before. But that doesn't discuss this change list. We're still not ready for that! Next, what the code *was*.
- The old code was slow. Very very slow. It was built on the idea that hashing bucket keys is fast. And checking if a hashed key exists is fast. That's all laid out by The Orange Book. It casuallys says for more speed you can make it heirarchical (which we very much need). Unfortunately our particular use case, small things on the surface of a large sphere, is somewhat degenerate. It results in a huge number of potential neighbors almost all of which CAN'T exist because they are under the surface or in the air. Bah hum bug. What happens is late game hundreds of thousands of hashes and lookups per tick resulting in a 10 to 40 ms PhysicsWorld::broadPhase

- The worst case number of pairs to consider for physics is n^2. Every object potentially collides with every other object. For our game n is on the order of thousands. n^2 is therefore millions. Far far too large. The goal of the broadphase is drastically reduce the number of pairs to be considered by the narrowPhase.

- New code time!
- The new code broadphase takes only a couple of milliseconds. And even that can be made faster when it's worth it.
- The new code is also super, super simple which is nice.
- The meaning of the hgrid is the same even.
- The new HGrid stores bucket pairs. The broadphase then generates object pairs for all objects in those bucket pairs. It is still n^2 object pairs for a given bucket pair, but the size of n for each bucket is quite small.
- FWIW in at least one real game scenario that number of pairs created by the broadphase for n objects is on the order of 1n to 10n. That's pretty reasonable.

The team continues to blast through bugs, lists of polish items and performance optimizations.

Find lobbies more easily - you can name them now, and the default naming will make it much easier to find the lobby you're looking for. Add tags for competitive, casual, comp stomp or simply testing. Get the people that are looking for the kind of game you want to play.

The AI continues to learn how to dominate across each star system, and features continue to get polished and finished. Hop in and play today, Commanders!

Detailed Build Notes:

[AI] AI does better at sending orbital radar to other planets.
[AI] AI ignores econ cost of units in transit between planets.
[AI] AI will send basic orbital radar to other planets more often.
[AI] AI should be a little more nuke happy on planets it has full control over.
[AI] AI will nuke enemy commanders.
[AI] Fix for AI getting stuck trying to send units through a teleporter when the end point died.
[AI] AI will swarm enemy commanders, if they have enough units.
[AI] Fix for AI being unable to properly use air units due to the fact you cannot use fetchVoxel() to get a voxel for anything not on the ground.
[AI] AI should use teleporters a bit more effectively.
[AI] AI economy updates.
[AI] Edited AI difficulties so that lower difficulties are overly careless with their units rather than overly conservative.

[Balance] Increase sight range for Assault bot.
[Balance] Thrusters on planets where the owning army is allied with you will no longer count cancel out your thrust power. They still wont add thrust power for you.

[Camera] Fix for planets visually snapping to a final position after being destroyed.
[Camera] Camera will no longer move to the sun after a planet dies.

[Celestial] Planets will now orient to put their engines behind them (as best they can) during a planet smash.

[Lobby] Game names now include the tag (casual, competitive, etc...) instead of the system name.

[Mods] Modded servers will now show up without requiring a client mod.
[Mods] Mods now show up in a list under the game details.
[Mods] You can now filter games based on specific mods. the mod filter widget will automatically include the names of any mods applied to active games.

[Pathing] Fix for units getting stuck against structures and walls.
[Pathing] Fixed Fabbers not moving to a structure when they should
[Pathing] Fixed assist nucular missle fabbing from not working
[Pathing] Fix for units getting stuck attempting to build something and failing to move out of the way.

[Replays] Replay browser now displays better game info for GW games. Old was just 'Player (+1 AI)', New is 'username: Galactic War "war name" (turn X, system name), vs. AI army names'

[Systems] Added expected player counts to generated star systems.

[UI] Lobby tag support. current tag list includes ('Casual', 'Competitive', 'AI Battle', 'Testing').
[UI] Changed default game filters to show only games in the 'lobby' state. added filters for game status ( open player slots, open spectator slots, any open slot ) and game type ('free for all', 'team armies').
[UI] Fix for chat auto-scroll in the lobby.

The launch edition of the game includes a number of upgrades, including enhancements to both single-player and multiplayer. It will also include two new features: resource-rich gas giants and the "Annihilaser," a celestial laser of doom that obliterates planets with each tremendous blast.

As a thank you to our generous backers and early access supporters, we're giving you all access to these features shortly via a game update.

Additionally, the release build of Planetary Annihilation will be available on the show floor at PAX this August 29 through September 3.

Thank you again for all your support throughout development. We're thrilled to deliver on our vision for an RTS with massive scale and even more massive battles, easy-to-use tools, and incredible moments. We can't wait to show you what's next.

The launch edition of the game includes a number of upgrades, including enhancements to both single-player and multiplayer. It will also include two new features: resource-rich gas giants and the "Annihilaser," a celestial laser of doom that obliterates planets with each tremendous blast.

As a thank you to our generous backers and early access supporters, we're giving you all access to these features shortly via a game update.

Thank you again for all your support throughout development. We're thrilled to deliver on our vision for an RTS with massive scale and even more massive battles, easy-to-use tools, and incredible moments. We can't wait to show you what's next.

Patch Notes:

AI: Improve the AI's handling of Gas Giants.

Annihilazer: the metal planet can now target planets with active thrusters.

Bug: Fix for crash when a unit is on the final leg of a celestial move to a planet that gets smashed.

Chat: Disabled the keyboard capture stack handling in live game.
Chat: Breaks due to capturing more than it releases due to being inside of the computed without current capture state tracking

Gameplay: Fix for being unalbe to set an orbital factory or orbital launcher rally point on a gas giant.

Lobby: Maximum length limit for the lobby name.

UI: fixed a bug with planetary weapon control alert logic.
UI: you can now join an army after leaving a shared army (since the selectedCommander function will now always return a well formed object). also fixes the preferred commander logic.
UI: shared armies will only use a single color. players (except the first player in an army) will give up their color when they join a shared army.

The launch edition of the game includes a number of upgrades, including enhancements to both single-player and multiplayer. It will also include two new features: resource-rich gas giants and the "Annihilaser," a celestial laser of doom that obliterates planets with each tremendous blast.

As a thank you to our generous backers and early access supporters, we're giving you all access to these features shortly via a game update.

Thank you again for all your support throughout development. We're thrilled to deliver on our vision for an RTS with massive scale and even more massive battles, easy-to-use tools, and incredible moments. We can't wait to show you what's next.

Patch Notes:

Server memory usage improvements. This should help mitigate many of the lag concerns that have been popping up in some circumstances.

Annihilazer: the metal planet can now target planets with active thrusters.

Balance: Decrease the grav-well speed of nukes to help mitigate them going in circles around smaller planets.

Bug: Fix for crash when a unit is on the final leg of a celestial move to a planet that gets smashed.

Chat: Disabled the keyboard capture stack handling in live game.
Chat: Breaks due to capturing more than it releases due to being inside of the computed without current capture state tracking

Galactic War: Anti-nuke working again

Gameplay: Fix for being unalbe to set an orbital factory or orbital launcher rally point on a gas giant.
Gameplay: Fix for tactical missile bot not working when moving away from targets.
Gameplay: Fix for weapons and projectiles damaging your own units even with splash_damages_allies set to false.
Gameplay: Updated the firing tolerance for the metal planet weapon. Fixes a situation where the planet appears to be on target but does not fire.
Gameplay: Advanced Assault Bot can fire on land again
Gameplay: Attack move with non-combat units (Combat fabbers or other units without weapon) work again as expected

Lobby: Maximum length limit for the lobby name.

Replays: Replay browser now allows replay playback from direct lobby IDs pasted into search box, even if those lobby IDs aren't in the displayed replay list.

UI: fixed a bug with planetary weapon control alert logic.
UI: you can now join an army after leaving a shared army (since the selectedCommander function will now always return a well formed object). also fixes the preferred commander logic.
UI: shared armies will only use a single color. players (except the first player in an army) will give up their color when they join a shared army.
UI: Alerts and hover details: alert styling fix to center text properly in alert, and fix title text spacing in hover detail

The launch edition of the game includes a number of upgrades, including enhancements to both single-player and multiplayer. It will also include two new features: resource-rich gas giants and the "Annihilaser," a celestial laser of doom that obliterates planets with each tremendous blast.

As a thank you to our generous backers and early access supporters, we're giving you all access to these features shortly via a game update.

Thank you again for all your support throughout development. We're thrilled to deliver on our vision for an RTS with massive scale and even more massive battles, easy-to-use tools, and incredible moments. We can't wait to show you what's next.

Patch Notes:

Server memory usage improvements. This should help mitigate many of the lag concerns that have been popping up in some circumstances.

Gameplay: Fix for being unalbe to set an orbital factory or orbital launcher rally point on a gas giant.
Gameplay: Fix for tactical missile bot not working when moving away from targets.
Gameplay: Fix for weapons and projectiles damaging your own units even with splash_damages_allies set to false.
Gameplay: Updated the firing tolerance for the metal planet weapon. Fixes a situation where the planet appears to be on target but does not fire.
Gameplay: Advanced Assault Bot can fire on land again
Gameplay: Attack move with non-combat units (Combat fabbers or other units without weapon) work again as expected
Gameplay: Added the PAX Prime system to the default systems.
Gameplay: Fix patrolling units from stopping after attacking an enemy unit.

Linux: Coherent hotfix for BadAccess problem.

Lobby: Maximum length limit for the lobby name.

Replays: Replay browser now allows replay playback from direct lobby IDs pasted into search box, even if those lobby IDs aren't in the displayed replay list.

UI: fixed a bug with planetary weapon control alert logic.
UI: you can now join an army after leaving a shared army (since the selectedCommander function will now always return a well formed object). also fixes the preferred commander logic.
UI: shared armies will only use a single color. players (except the first player in an army) will give up their color when they join a shared army.
UI: Alerts and hover details: alert styling fix to center text properly in alert, and fix title text spacing in hover detail

It's been a few days since we hit 1.0, but we're still hard at work, adding polish, fixing bugs as we find em - or you in our community report them! Keep playing, keep reporting - on the forums, on Steam, on reddit - what's working, what you're loving, what you're not loving quite so much, and we'll keep making it better and more awesome.

Thanks all!

Build Notes:

AI: Fix for AIs that start on other planets by themselves not doing much. Improved how the AI determines it is alone on a planet. (should be much faster)
AI: AI neural net update.
AI: AI econ adjustment.

Gameplay: Fix for start location generation getting into an infinite loop when there isn't enough pathable area on a planet.
Gameplay: Fix for radar structures never being active if they were built while the army's energy was stalled too far.
Gameplay: Fix for orbital units not being able to do certain area commands on gas giants.
Gameplay: Fix for trees and structures still visible after planet destroyed.

Memory: Limit CSG and planet textures to 1024x1024 maximum (saving up to 200MB of graphics memory and 200MB of system memory, or 400MB of memory on integrated graphics on a large game with multiple biomes).

UI: A number of fixes to startup flow; you shouldn't be able to skip past the Steam / PlayFab linking now, galactic war video will no long auto play, and a few others.

It's alive! It's alive! Listen closely and you can hear the mad cackling of our AI programmer, Sorian. He takes great joy in making Planetary Annihilation's robot intelligences even more lifelike -- and this week he's sharing his work. Prepare for the pain.

Starting now, expect to see more dynamic AI in certain previously troublesome scenarios. For instance, the Planetary Annihilation's AI can now target your Commanders specifically with nukes. Previously, the AI did a quick calculation about the structures around enemy Commanders before blasting a Commander into oblivion. Now, the AI will just let 'em rip, regardless of the metal value of the structures in the surrounding area.

Today's update also includes a host of fixes across multiple parts of the game (including those pesky econ alerts).

Check out the patch notes for all of the major fixes:

[AI] The AI will react better when the only intel it has is radar blips.
[AI] AI commanders will return to the safety of their base when they have nothing better to do.
[AI] The AI will act to remove all land and air threats once there are no more econ threats.
[AI] AI land platoons are now less likely to run away once they have made it into an enemy base.
[AI] The AI commander can now help out planet wide if the AI controls the whole planet.
[AI] AI will now target commanders with nukes, regardless of the metal value of the structures around him.

[Galactic War] The default gw game name is no longer 'New Game'. The format is now 'War - ' + dd//mm/yyyy.

[Gameplay] Fix for radars continuing to work when set to conserve energy.
[Gameplay] Oribtal transports now ignore goal collisions when loading and unloading.
[Gameplay] The goal radius for load and unload has been shrunk.

[Graphics] Reduce memory overhead of impostors by ~10MB for large systems by using shared depth buffers.

[Localization] Huge loc additions. Added: Korean, Arabic

[Notifications] Added combat tracking (currently based on units destroyed). the 'acknowedge alert' action will now zoom to the latest combat if there are no other alerts. Also added a specific 'zoom to combat' command.
[Notifications] Fix for the repeating low cmdr health warning. this just prevents it from firing if your cmdr (the one you spawned with) dies.
[Notifications] Audio tweaks to reduce the frequecy of economy overflow warnings.

[UI] Quick fix for the invisible console bug. this removes the default binding for toggle console. This fixes the UI lockup issue some people would encounter when hitting the ~ by mistake.
[UI] Changed the unit celestial path shader to be solid instead of faded.
[UI] The ui will now remember your display name after you leave the main menu.

Congratulations, space warrior! You've earned a new achievement. Just kidding. You haven't earned anything yet (outside of our undying gratitude for playing our game). But now? Oh-ho. Now, you can flash some fancy cheevos and trading cards if you exhibit the raw intensity and ability to earn them. Welcome to our latest update, the Steam Community Update, which adds a couple of ways to impress your friends with digital feats of strength and cunning.

That’s right: starting, uh, now, Planetary Annihilation supports Steam trading cards, badges, and achievements. In Steam, click on “achievements” to learn more about what you’ll need to do to unlock them. Simply by playing, you’ll be able to earn cards.

So, go ahead. Let's see what you can do, warriors. We'll be watching, waiting to see who can grab them all.

In the meanwhile, enjoy some of the other fixes and tweaks we've introduced with this patch. Full notes below:

Balance: All units arriving at a planet via celestial space will now have a 3 second cooldown before they can take any action.

Gameplay: Fix for tactical missiles flipping out when targeting factory wreckage.
Gameplay: Make Area Patrol more gooder!! Ground and Sea units now use a guarding behavior when they do area patrol. Each unit type has a pool of shared area targets that they pull from in order to do a small local area patrol. If any nearby units have an attack target, other units will also target it. If the units are too far away from their destination during whole planet patrol they will use the army wide cached targets to keep memory spiking down. This improves both patrol behavior and navigation performance when doing area patrols!
Gameplay: Adjusted the guard radius calculation to be the same everywhere.
Gameplay: Adjusted the guard radius for all units to be something more reasonable.
Gameplay: Fix for units firing into terrain if their target happened to be close to blocking terrain.
Gameplay: Land mines can now take damage from weapons and explosions.

System Editor: Fix for not showing the busy message when going from a terrain preview to a full preview.

UI: Unit selection group display.
UI: The client can now limit total number of coherent processes. This is mostly important if you have limited memory. (Suggested by our users.) Use --coherent-options="--renderer-process-limit=N" to change the value, or --coherent-options="--single-process" to run in single-process mode. (Really not recommended...)

Windows: Tell NVIDIA Optimus to use discrete graphics.

Extended Notes:

You are now able to view metal spots in the system editor!
- Clicking "Preview" in the system editor will generate a planet without metal spots (and without having to create nav or physics world).
- Clicking "Preview" with the "with metal spots" checkbox ticked will generate and display metal spots.
If you already have a planet preview the terrain will not be regenerated.
- While a planet preview with metal spts is up adjusting "metal density" or "metal clusters" will give immediate feedback without regenerating the planet terrain.
- Metal spot placement in the system editor is accurate, except in the case of start locations.

System Editor: Multiple polish items.
- Nav mesh generation no longer blocks the UI
- Metal spots can now be turned on and off.
- Starting planet flag is now correct on load.
- Exiting the system editor goes back to the system load screen.
- Clicking on a planet no longer moves it.

Hotfix Build: 73441 resolves a few issues trying to load the Syncronous boss battle, as well as playing a Generals Commander game with the Syncronous faction. The hotfix also reduces load times for complex systems, and reduces client memory usage.

We’re happy to announce the release of the offline server. Offline server allows you to take over the galaxy in Galactic War without connecting to the Internet. You can also battle against your frenemies or the AI over a LAN.

You'll also see your massive armies moving around much better now. After almost two months, and a team focused on improving pathing, you should see major improvements on unit pathing, reliability, and performance across the board. And as always, each build includes a host of bug fixes, performance improvements, and even more polish.

Notes for offline play:

We have had a few reports of people unable to launch offline server mode. If this happens to you, please go to settings and change Local Server to “OFF”. We are exploring the issue internally, and will be getting out a fix ASAP. Thanks for your patience.

Local Server Settings: “AUTO” will determine the best mode to use based on your system specs and requested game mode. “ON” will always try and use the local server for any supported game modes. “OFF” will force your client to connect to our servers for all game modes.

[Server] Disabled the idle timer for local games.
[Server] The server is 64-bit only. Due to memory restrictions and a number of other technical roadblocks, there is no 32-bit server version. (This only affects Windows, since Windows is the only platform that still supports a 32-bit client)
[Server] The spec that the server looks for to run locally is the same as our recommended spec - 8GB of RAM and quad core. You can override this by setting Local Server to "ON", which means it will try and use a local server for everything - except online hosted games, which still go through Uber's online server management.

[System Editor] Planets now look exactly the same in game as they do in the system editor.
[System Editor] Metal spot placement now looks exactly the same in game as it does in the system editor.

[UI] Spectator UI upgrades
[UI] System editor UI polish

Detailed Pathing Notes:

Flow Field Integration has much improved CPU and Memory performance.

Sectors are now independent from terrain meshes, resulting in much smaller sectors.

Better Path Planning: Smaller sectors make the higher level path graph more granular which results in more 'accurate' path planning. In the past units might go 'right' when they should have gone 'left' around a rock. This change fixes that.

Dynamic Walls support: If you surround yourself using dynamic wall pieces, the pathfinder behaves correctly. We now rebuild the path graph and small / large pathable islands so 'pathability' queries are correct.

Faster Nav startup time: Nav Voxels now use an inlining Octree container, which improves start up time as well as run time and memory usage.